As 2009 came to a close, it was clear that quite a few iSeries and System i customers were amping up their system upgrade activity. The fourth quarter is a natural time frame for upgrades, of course, but some customers were also taking advantage of IBM incentives, particularly the successful iLoyalty program that gave up a no-charge IBM i processor license and a 50 percent off IBM i user license discount.

The basic sell here is showing customers on older hardware that, by upgrading to a newer system, they could get a new Power System at a price that would be competitive with the costs of simply maintaining their older system. One value-added reseller, Maximum Computer Systems (MCS), reported nine orders for new Power System boxes in the last two weeks before the promotion ended in December. A nice bit of action, definitely. MCS, by the way, is the company that acquired Barsa Systems Distribution earlier this year, which extended the company's SMB sweet spot into larger enterprise accounts in the Northeast.

Still, the bulk of the action has been with companies that IBM's iLoyalty program has targeted for upgrades, and the overall message of gaining a more modern system with greater throughput and lower maintenance costs moving forward appears to be working.

“With all the new processors and all the new disk drives, most customers can go down one processor tier,” notes Steve Kurzban, director of sales for MCS. “People who were P20s can be P10s; people who were P10s can be P5s . . . as long as they can live with the limitations of the lower machines in terms of growth.”

IBM i in a Rack

One of the trends that Kurzban has seen over the last few years is that more and more customers are opting to put the IBM i “box” in a rack instead.

“Now, even on the low-end, about two-thirds [of our sold units] are going out horizontal in customer-sourced racks--the customer is taking the iSeries that used to be sitting in the corner attracting attention from upper management and is now putting it into a rack next to their Wintel servers,” Kurzban explains.

“The question we're asking at on-site visits is, 'Do you have 4U available for the CPU and another 2U for a UPS?' And invariably the answer is 'Yes,' and there's a sigh of relief from the IT manager so he can make the '400 look like just another server,” Kurzban says.

“One of the virtues of selling it that way is that you can position it as it should be positioned--as the world's best transaction server. It's not a proprietary mini mainframe. It's a transaction server working in an IP world,” he adds.

How About Blades?

After IBM introduced its first IBM i on a blade option for an IBM BladeCenter, it was a bit difficult for many customers to find the right situation where it was cost-effective and would plug in with the customer's investments. Now, though, IBM's made additional connectivity improvements, plus customers are further along the blade road.

“Many of our customers are taking a serious look at the Power Blade solutions. It might not be a good fit for everyone, but it can be really attractive from a pricing standpoint,” says Stan Staszak, director of infrastructure services for Sirius, which is a large IBM Premier Business Partner who does a lot of IBM i-related sales. “I think more companies are starting to adopt some form of blade-based server solutions in their data centers, so customers may be somewhat more receptive to blades now--as opposed to traditional rack or tower based servers.”

Some speed bumps remain, though.

“The obvious challenge to a IBM i on Blade solution is the learning curve. Customers have to become familiar with VIOS and external storage servers--unless they utilize the internal disk on the BladeCenter S chassis,” he explains.

POWER7 Looming, Storage, and PowerVM

With IBM widely expected to launch POWER7-based options sometime soon--if not already by the time you read this--some customers have already started looking ahead, Staszak says, which includes interest in IBM's upcoming upgrade to IBM i this spring.

As for storage, Staszak notes, “I think the recent DS5xxx native attach announcement was interesting. Only time will tell how receptive customers will be to that model (on the IBM i platform). I also like and appreciate the fact that IBM is continuing to invest in internal SAS disk and controllers. IBM i customers don't like to feel that they are forced to adopt some new technology.”

He adds, “We have seen some IBM i accounts implement external storage, and I'm sure that others will go that route in the future, but it's nice to have a valid internal disk alternative for customers who prefer internal disk.”

Speaking of disk, IBM first announced Solid State Drive (SSD) support for IBM i at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada last spring, then followed up with additional support in October.

Staszak says Sirius hasn't sold many SSD setups yet, but they are seeing a fair amount of interest. “IBM recently came out with a nice modeling tool that will help customers estimate what impact it can have on disk I/O performance. Even replacing a small subset of drives with SSD and rebalancing the data can have a big effect on batch run times,” he notes.

As for PowerVM, it's doing well, but it's important to note that PowerVM isn't as new as it seems. “The majority of our customers have already employed a virtualized strategy in the form of LPAR's, which necessitates a PowerVM license. Also, PowerVM is required if they choose to implement VIOS in their environment,” Staszak explains.

“I haven't seen any IBM i customers trying Active Memory Sharing yet, but this technology would also require PowerVM,” he adds.

New Footprints and Protecting Old Ones

In addition to mining the install base for upgrades, MCS has also seen some success with new IBM i installs via its Infor ERP business unit. And Kurzban is also seeing some possible interest in new ERP implementations on a BladeCenter. Obviously there's a lot of sizing issues that need to be worked out for each individual organization, but it's possible to use different processors in a blade environment with shared storage.

“No one can run everything that's needed to run a modern business on one platform. Doing things with shared storage is going to be the way to do it,” Kurzban says, noting that while a customer may utilize IBM i, they'll also utilize Wintel for e-commerce or data mining or document management.

In addition, a lot of smaller customers are still working out their backup solutions, and MCS has been successfully offering online backup services via i365.com, which is now owned by Seagate. i365's services cover a variety of platforms, including IBM i, and Kurzban says that one customer recently had its CFO overwrite a key HR spreadsheet . . . but the company's IT department was able to recover it in ten minutes via i365's solution. Obviously, the CFO won't have much hesitation signing off on the i365 expenses in the future.

For MCS, Kurzban also makes a great point I want to share: the IBM i, System i, and iSeries ecosystem has been a bit rocky over the last several years, and in some situations hardware sales seemed to start drying up. “But when we combined different solutions with machines and workloads, that's when the hardware business flourished,” he explains.

And this, it turns out, brings up a whole new issue, and that's keeping track of IBM i sales and IBM i-focused hardware sales: it's only going to get harder. IBM won't publicly report its IBM i OS unit sales or revenue, and the hardware distinction is essentially gone--it's all a Power System now. And resellers, too, are having a harder time tracking their selling activity.

“From an IBM Solution Provider perspective, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate between IBM i and AIX related hardware orders,” Staszak explains. Due to the fact that now all of the Power Systems model types are common, it is hard to accurately measure IBM i vs. AIX sales.”

Chris Maxcer (chris.maxcer@penton.com) is news editor for System iNEWS magazine. “The big takeway, I think, is that there’s still a lot of older systems in play that are ripe for cost-effective upgrades,” he says. “And the sooner we can get customers onto Power Systems running IBM i, the better--makes it much easier for IBM to deliver innovation, and for customers to take advantage of it.”